Creationist Debate Update Part 3: The Evolution Of A Pepsi Can

An attendant of the Comfort/Cameron vs. RRS debate has a rough breakdown of the event here.

Comfort used his "can" argument, which is so absurd that it bears repeating. Basically, it says that it is improbable for the big bang to have formed a Pepsi can. Therefore, the can was designed. Since humans are more complex than Pepsi cans, they are designed as well. And design=designer.

There are several major problems with this argument:

1. Cans do not replicate. Humans do. When I look at a can, I know it came from a factory (from experience). When I look at a human, I know that it came from a union of a sperm and egg. Analogizing randomly mutating replicators to cans is like comparing apples and...cans. Whenever creationists pull this kind of argument out, I simply shrug. It's one that wouldn't pass muster in a junior high debate team match, and it's been refuted so many times that all defenders of science are exhausted repeating the obvious: life produces offspring genetically different from itself, cans/watches/747's/cars do not.
2. Design does not equal designer. Cans are the product of a design process, not a "designer." No one person designs any can you may find. It's the result of countless marketers, fabricators, chemical and metallurgical engineers, and government public health officials. To say that any can has a single "designer" is obviously ridiculous, and the analogy to this design process would raise some uncomfortable propositions for evangelicals (ex, how do you know we were designed by a single designer and not by committee? Wouldn't the latter, given all of our flaws, make more sense?). Evolution is a design process as well: species change due to survival and reproductive advantages that naturally arise among genetically different offspring. Again, the analogy is so piss-poor, so egregiously illogical, one wonders how its proponents can get through the day without their brain leaking out of their nose.
3. The argument that evolutionary theory states that complex life arose through a random, spontaneous event is a blatant straw man argument. Simple life took billions of years to develop, and it did so through a series of chemical processes. And that's not evolutionary theory. Once it did develop, it took off, and species have changed dramatically over the span of life on earth. The only explanation for these changes is evolutionary theory. Comfort's "can" argument dishonestly implies that scientists believe that complex species rose from a primordial soup randomly out of the blue. I can't help but point out that people like Mr. Comfort believe that a pro-Semitic space genie created a human male from dust and a human female from a human male rib! To believe life arose spontaneously without evoking a magical sky-daddy would be difficult, but evoking magic makes it no less absurd. Perhaps Mr. Comfort should read what scientists understand about how life arose, and then how it evolved after that, before he starts telling other people how ridiculous science's explanation is.
   

There may be other flaws as well, but 3 is enough to bury any proposition. The big question now is: how do we teach people to detect and reject poor logic?